Emily spent nine years recruiting for local government, education, and the charity sector before specialising in CVs and application forms for public sector and third sector roles. She has sat on interview panels for teaching positions, civil service roles, and charity leadership posts, and knows the competency based frameworks these sectors rely on better than most people who have never worked inside one of those panels themselves.
Public sector applications reward a very particular kind of evidence, and Emily is precise about it. Civil service Success Profiles, safeguarding documentation, and structured competency answers all need to follow a format that a panel has been trained to score against, and missing that structure can sink an otherwise strong application before anyone even considers the candidate's actual experience. She has read enough rejected applications to know that the problem is rarely a lack of ability, it is almost always a mismatch between how someone naturally describes their work and how the form expects it to be described.
At the same time, Emily pushes back against applications that become so formulaic they lose the sense of purpose that drew someone to the sector in the first place. She says the best public sector and charity CVs still sound like a real person who cares about the work, just organised in a way the panel can score fairly, and getting both of those things right at once is harder than it sounds.
Based in Bristol, Emily has nine years of experience across recruitment and application writing in this space. She works with clients moving into teaching, civil service, local government, and charity leadership roles, and finds the grant funded and mission driven positions particularly satisfying to write for, since the client's motivation usually comes through clearly once the structure is in place around it.